omnia_mutantur | "expected, if not predicted"

the problem with not being able to access lj from work, is that i can't
quite remember if i posted about this, or only wrote the post in my head.
but i'm going to hope that this is fresh material, and if i find out it
isn't when i get home, i'll remove it.

however awkward, seeing Iceberg was fantastic. his name, if i haven't
glossed it before, comes from an Elizabeth Bishop poem. "We'd rather have
the iceberg than the ship, although it meant the end of travel" and i think
he was my iceberg, but maybe sometimes he was my ship, or vice versa. he
comes from the era of trying to learn to separate sex from intimacy, where i
had causal encounters with my clothes off, but still wanted to come home to
the same person every night. i don't think i knew the rules to what i was
doing, much less shared them, so sometimes it looked like i had a crush on
him, because i did, but i wasn't very highly sexed then, sex was a tool, not
a desire any more than a stepladder would be a desire, so it wasn't exactly
a crush.

and there have been so many men that i've tried this with, starting with the
eagle scout in gradeschool into junior high into highschool. then lesson,
then normality, then chemistry, then catalyst, then the chilean, and then
iceberg (there are other stories, other names i'm not telling, because
either they fit in this mold too well, or not at all). i'm not sure what
i did after college, because History satisfied some of that desire, but the
very fact of being out of school meant that i'd either have to learn to
satisfy the need to bring all my stories to the same person at the end of my
day in my roommate or my relationships. and i tried, half and half, split
between other people's desires, learning my way around the pioneer valley by
sleeping with too many people, trying to stay warm and fed (physically and
emotionally) as much as possible, living mostly for my cat and to prove
everyone who went before wrong. but that is neither here nor there anymore.

iceberg was there in the trenches with me. i don't have to prove who i was
to him, i don't have to explain over and over again that functionality
doesn't mean that i'm fixed, or that i never was broken, or any other
metaphor people use to describe times when they snapped. he saw me with
cigarette burns on my hands, he saw me spend most of a year actively
not-drinking. he laughed at the soap operas i found myself in, and insulted
me more than anyone else ever has. he slept in my bed, i slept in his, i
wrote poems about him that i read in a poetry reading, never sure if he knew
i was talking about him, and he left me, just like everyone had, for a
girlfriend, for someone better. and there was never a way to fight against
the too-skinny blondes of the world, people who were whole enough to be
everything to one person, not scattering themselves like chaff.

but i don't have to describe what college was like to him, he read deleuze
and guattari, he ate the same fried things bar, and felt the same pressure,
that we would be faceted diamonds or we would shatter, for all the
postmodernity and artglass, there would be no greyscale. he understood that
college aid wasn't the great leveling ground it claimed to be, and that
class existed, in and outside of the school, and while he came at it from
the other side than me, at least he spoke language.

but as my beloved muse and sage reminds me, i'm throwing rocks at myself,
and i'm here now.
i'll force beauty like outofseason bulbs out of this, and save my pocket
change to buy her that box, and cuddle with the cats as often as possible,
and remember january first is just another day, no matter how melodramatic i
get.